


...for wage or yet for wed

by Vaznetti



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:03:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17041673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/pseuds/Vaznetti
Summary: Two meetings between Francis Crawford and Christian Stewart, in the music room at Flaw Valleys.





	...for wage or yet for wed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> Dear Aurilly, I very much hope you enjoy this story! I followed your guidance and decided to ignore the engagement between Christian and Tom Erskine. In this universe, it never happened!

“It’s damned inconvenient,” Grey was saying, as Gideon Somerville turned away from Lady Christian. “I can’t keep her here in Berwick. I’d send her home to my own wife but she isn’t well and…” He paused, and gave Gideon a considering look. “Kate is well, isn’t she?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Gideon said, although he was hard pressed to think of an excuse that didn’t involve the admission that he was already looking after one Scottish prisoner: and one he knew well that Grey was looking for. He couldn’t expect Kate to take in the girl as well: the fact that she claimed to be a friend of Crawford’s was no help.

“Nonsense,” Grey said briskly. “It’s the perfect solution. I don’t want to ask the favour of Lady Lennox now,” he added. “We can send a maid with her, and that boy she uses as a guide. You go write a letter to Kate to explain it all. She’ll be glad of the company, no doubt, with you away.” He turned back to the papers his Secretary Miles had brought. “Well? What are you two still doing here? Go write the letter, Gideon, and you, Lady Christian, go pack.”

Gideon went glumly to write the letter; it and the Scottish girl were gone before Grey had finished his conversation with Margaret Lennox.

***

The same letter rested in Kate’s hands the next day, delivered by an ugly officer up from York. He and his men were heading on to Carlisle, leaving behind the girl and her servant. _I know,_ Gideon had written, _that you will make her welcome, until she can be returned to her own friends, perhaps sooner than she expects._

“She’s a cheery little thing, for all that she’s blind,” the officer said. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful for anything you can do for her.”

“No doubt,” Kate agreed absently. She had never had two Scottish guests at the same time before: would that get along, she wondered, or would she need to keep them apart like fighting cocks?

“We can put her in the bedroom at the end of the top corridor,” Philippa offered, as the girl was helped off her horse and guided forward. “It’s very secure.”

“Philippa,” Kate hissed. 

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Christian was saying. “I met Mr. Somerville in Berwick and he made me think I would be very comfortable here.”

“Did he?” Kate said. “I hope we can live up to his promises.” She hoped too, as she arranged for the soldiers and their mounts to be fed and watered before being sent on their way, that her other guest was comfortable and well-hidden somewhere; Philippa was eyeing the sergeant from York in a way Kate didn’t entirely like. “Philippa, show Lady Christian inside to the parlour, so she can rest after her journey.”

The sergeant and his men ate and left, and Kate sent Christian’s things up to her own room. Someone would need to protect everyone else’s respectability here, she thought, and there was no one else to delegate that job to. In the parlour she found Christian and Philippa bent over Philippa’s lute, but Christian lifted her head as soon as Kate came to the door.

“There is someone else in the bedroom Philippa mentioned, isn’t there?” Christian asked. “That’s why you can’t put me there.”

“Philippa!” Kate said again, and then, “How did you know?” 

“Listen!” Lady Christian’s face was intent, and then Kate heard it too, very faintly: a children’s song being picked out on the harpsichord in the music room. “He told me once he would finish the song for me. Take me to Mr. Crawford right away, Mistress Somerville. Please, it’s important!”

The door to the music room was ajar, and Lymond was sitting in the window, the sun turning his hair silvery gold. “You should be hiding,” Kate said. “What if Philippa had turned you in to the sergeant?”

“I was hiding,” he said. “You see me fresh from the milkshed, like Arjuna.” He put down the lute and stood. “What is Lady Christian doing here?”

“That isn’t important,” Christian said. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Harvey, and he told me everything. I have it all, his confession, written and signed. Sym!” she called, and the boy came running in. “Get my pack, and the blanket from the bedroll, right away!”

“It seems important to me,” Lymond said, turning to Kate. 

“Lady Christian was at Dalkeith,” Kate said, “when Grey raided it last week. As for why she is here, I suspect some kind of conspiracy of Gideon’s, with Lord Grey as his unknowing accomplice.”

“Lord Grey didn’t want to trouble Lady Lennox with looking after me,” Christian supplied.

A flash of something crossed Lymond’s unguarded face. “But why were you at Dalkeith?”

“I went to talk to George Douglas,” Christian said.

“On my behalf,” he said. “Of all the foolish, unnecessary risks—”

“It seemed necessary to me,” Christian said. “You may disagree with my choices, but I don’t abandon my friends easily. And you’ll understand in a moment, it has all turned out for the best. Listen, here is Sym.”

A moment later the boy came in. “Here is your bedroll, Lady Christian.” He put it into her hands and she ran her fingers down the edge of the blanket until she found what she was looking for. She turned to Kate. “Do you have scissors, Mistress Somerville?” Kate took the blanket instead and began to rip out the stitches, revealing a set of folded papers. “It’s all there,” Christian said. “I told you, I met Samuel Harvey at Haddington. He was wounded, and he told me everything, how they inserted the information into your letters to hide their own spy, although the spy died soon after in any case. I think he wanted it off his conscience. The priest was with us, he heard it all and signed as a witness.” Her colour was high as she spoke. Lymond, looking at her, seemed dumbstruck, as if he didn’t understand her words. “They prove that you’re innocent, Mr Crawford. You can go home.”

The room fell silent: Lymond, turning to look at Kate, read something on her face that turned his own to dread. She stared down at the crumpled packet in her hands, blinking back tears. “Lady Christian,” she said thickly. “I’m sorry. The papers are blank.” The clouds chasing across the sky sent shadows over the floor, and there was a crash from the kitchen. Kate wished that she was enough of a coward to go investigate.

“Blank?” Christian asked finally. “I don’t understand.”

Kate passed the papers to Lymond, who turned them over and over, as if the words might suddenly appear if they were looked at from the right angle. He was, Kate thought, still trying to control the confusion and fear in his face, and she wondered suddenly how old he really was. “I don’t understand either,” she said. “Are you sure that—”

“No! I know the priest wrote it down,” Christian said. “I heard the pen.” She stood and took a few steps across the room, until she bumped into a table and stopped. 

“You heard the pen,” Lymond said softly. “But of course you would have no idea what was being written.”

Christian’s cheeks flushed red. “It was Mr. Harvey’s confession. Sym was with me.”

“But, conveniently for someone, Sym cannot read.” His face was as white now as Christian’s was red, but his voice was even. “From this perspective it seems that you’ve interfered quite a lot, to no avail to me and quite a lot of danger to you.”

“I suppose you think I should have left you to be tortured at Threave as well!” Christian said hotly.

“If you’d thought for a moment you would have known that Buccleuch was due to turn up at any moment. I certainly didn’t ask you to speak for me.” 

“Forgive me for not realising that you had everything under control! It must have been all the chains.”

“You were the one who insisted on involving yourself,” Lymond continued. “Think about that, Lady Christian. You’ve created a hero and a romance for yourself, like Agnes Herries, but there is no hero and no romance. You are trying to help someone who doesn’t exist.” He threw the papers onto the ground and stalked out of the room.

As his footsteps faded Kate felt herself unfreeze: she took Christian’s hands and led her back to a seat. Christian was trembling, and tears were running down her face. “The originals may still exist,” she said as she put a crumpled handkerchief into the girl’s hands. “Perhaps Mr. Harvey decided to keep them, that’s all.”

“What does it matter, if he can’t get them!” 

What indeed, Kate thought. She was not in the least surprised to find that, once Christian was calmed and settled, the guards Gideon had set were already searching fruitlessly for Lymond. “You’d better hurry,” Kate murmured to herself. “Although I have no idea how you’ll get into Haddington; the entire Scots army have been trying for months.”

* * *

It became clear only later that Lymond had never intended to break into Haddington: he arrived entirely in the open, weighted with chains, in the train of Thomas Palmer who was also, by coincidence, there to see his cousin Samuel Harvey.

“Did he know about the raid you were planning?” Gideon asked his quasi-captor two days later, as they rode quietly back through the Border country.

“No,” Lord Culter had said firmly, and then, with a worried glance at his brother’s bandaged form, “I don’t see how he could have: we only got the news ourselves that the convoy was moving out the day before.” Culter sat easily in the saddle, but clutched the bloodstained pages of Harvey’s statement with white knuckles. He had said little on their slow ride south to Flaw Valleys, but he read and reread those pages, with almost as much frowning attention as he paid to his brother’s body, strapped to its horse. 

For his part, Lymond regarded his brother with caution, at least while he was conscious. He winced as Richard unwound the bandages on his feet. “Was all this entirely necessary?” Culter asked, frowning at the wounds.

“Like Saints Cosmo and Damian, my feet are the evidence of my faith,” Lymond answered. “How was I supposed to know you’d respond so well to evidence?”

Culter flushed, and Gideon bit his tongue. “We’ll rest here tonight,” Culter said. “The next day will see us the rest of the way to Mr. Somerville’s home.”

“About that,” Gideon said later. “What you do with your brother is your own business, but Lord Grey left Lady Christian in my care – in my wife’s care – until she can be returned properly, to her own family.”

“Don’t worry,” Culter said. “As far as Grey knows you’re a prisoner in Edinburgh, and I won’t do anything to disturb that illusion. But I want to talk to Christian Stewart myself.”

* * *

Francis Crawford woke to a cool cloth on his forehead, sharp pains in his hands and feet, and a whispered argument in the corner of the room.

“…about Mariotta?” his brother was asking.

“You’ll have to ask her yourself, Richard,” came Christian’s voice. “But you’ve read Mr. Harvey’s confession—”

“More than once.”

“Won’t you trust your own mother, if you won’t trust me?”

“Anyone can be blinded by love,” Richard said. “Even my mother.”

There was a pause. “Love has nothing to do with it,” Christian said firmly.

“No?” Richard asked.

“Has anyone ever told you that you sound very like him?” she asked, and at that Richard was silent.

There were people moving in the room now: rustling and steps. How many of his fingers had been injured, Francis wondered. He had lost count at six, and now both hands were throbbing evenly to the same rhythm as his heart. He should have predicted that Margaret Lennox would stand and gloat as his hands were broken: she had always claimed to love his hands. He shuffled through the memories, trying to put them into some kind of order: Richard breaking into the room, that must have happened, and Margaret being carried out. He had been on a horse for a while, with Richard there, and Gideon Somerville: or was that too unlikely a combination? 

A shadow fell over his face. “I’ll sit with him,” said Christian, and the other steps died away. She took the cloth away. “I know you’re awake,” she said. He blinked, and she was still there. He let his eyes focus on her: she looked tired, he thought, and her hair was coming loose from its net; he suppressed the urge to brush the strands back, and ask whether she had been sleeping enough. “You’re back in Flaw Valleys: Richard brought you. It isn’t clear whose prisoner is whose, at the moment, but Richard thinks we might unofficially exchange me for Mr. Somerville.” She turned confidently to the bedside table and felt along the surface until she found a jug and a cup. “Mistress Somerville has set everything up for me, as you see, but you will have to help if you’d like this to end up in your mouth rather than down your front again: I don’t know how she feels about the risk to her counterpanes of letting you feed yourself.”

“We will be a new breed of Norn,” Francis said after he’d used his bandaged hands to move the cup to his mouth and taken a sip, “with two eyes and two thumbs between us.” He caught his breath then, realising what he’d said, but she laughed. “Thank you,” he said simply. “Without Harvey’s confession I don’t think I would be speaking to you now.”

“You never know. Like Saints Cosmo and Damian, your hands and feet are signal enough of your faith.”

Had Richard made the comparison to her, he wondered, or was it her own as well?

“But in the story, Cosmo and Damian rescue the traveller’s wife from the devil. In this one…” Her mouth hardened, but he carried on. “In this story, you are the one who rescued me.” They were in the music room again, he realised, and was glad that he didn’t need to conceal the emotion on his cheeks from her eyes. “The last time we were in this room, I spoke cruelly.”

“You have nothing to apologise for.”

“On the contrary. Without Harvey’s statement, I would not even be here to thank you. I owe you not only an apology, and my thanks. I owe you my life.”

“I was not the only concerned party,” Christian demurred. “Your mother knew what I was doing as well.”

“ _Et pronuba Juno dant signum_. There has been a whole conspiracy to keep me alive, it seems, but I think you were one of the founding members. You involved yourself on my behalf from sheer goodness, as far as I can tell, and received nothing but abuse for it.” 

“If I am ever attacked by Satan,” she said, “I will be sure to call on you for help.”

“Most of our shared acquaintance believes you already have been attacked by Satan. I am still not sure why you disagreed.”

“I told you,” she said. “Sound is my stock in trade. I knew your voice as a child, and I know it now. And it does not conceal as much as you think.”

“ _Thy sapience is more, and thy works also, than the tidings I had heard_.” He almost asked, _shall I have no secrets from you?_ “It isn’t that you knew me when I didn’t know myself that is the marvel,” he said. “It’s that you knew me and still chose to aid me.”

“It is because I knew you,” she said.

The tall windows let light shine on the floor and on the bed, and on her wrinkled dress. “I cannot even play for you now,” he said, and brushed her hand with his bandaged one. “But Lady Christian, if you will not accept my apology, or my thanks, is there nothing of mine you will accept? I know my name has not been worth much of late, but if that does change it will be through your efforts more than my own.”

“I don’t want your pity,” she said.

“Pity? You have no idea what you are like, my dear. _Lady, flower of alle thing--_ ”

The poem was cut short of blasphemy as the door swung open and Philippa’s face peered through. “Is he awake now?” she asked, and stomped into the room without waiting for a reply. “Good. I haven’t been able to practice at the harpsichord for _days_.” She staked over to the instrument and sat, beginning a forceful set of scales.

Christian, he saw, was trying not to laugh. “I’m sure we are all hoping that music will speed your recovery,” she said. “Or else that you’ll be driven out of bed more quickly by the exercises.” Philippa scowled at the keys, and began picking out a piece by Fayrfax.

He continued more quietly. “Would you? Not from pity, or duty, or gratitude. You’ve saved this frog from a nation of cats, it seems, but he has been on his way to woo you through all this time. My dear, why do you think I could never cut you off?”

“You did your best to drive away Richard, and even your mother,” she said.

“But never you. I knew from the start that I should have, but I never could.” He paused. “When did you recognise me?”

“When you recognised yourself. I was almost sure before then, but that was when I knew beyond any doubt.”

“Well than, Mistress Mouse, what will you? Will you have your Frogge or no?”

“I—”

Philippa’s fingers crashed down on the harpsichord keys. “You can’t mean to marry Mr. Crawford!” she exclaimed, spinning around to glare at them both. “He’s horrible!”

“Do you know,” Christian said, “I think I do mean to marry him, after all.”

* * *

At one point someone suggested that the wedding be postponed until the war was over, but whatever Jenny Fleming saw on her ward’s face put a quick stop to that idea, and she went to order the bans to be read as soon as possible. Another moment of panic came when it seemed that the wedding should be held at Court, but that too was proved to be impossible, and so crowds of Crawfords and Flemings and Stewarts and Bucchleuchs gathered on a sunny September day in the chapel at Boghall. After the vows they followed the bride and groom to the great hall for spiced wine and sugared pastries, and watched Christian Stewart lead her husband, fully recovered in body and in reputation, onto the floor to dance. 

“Do the musicians sound familiar?” she asked, as he turned her round and bowed.

“I should hope so,” he said. “Unless your ears are failing. Now that mother has taken Johnny Bullo fully into her employ, I fear that we will be hearing them play at every Crawford gathering for the foreseeable future.”

She bounced on her toes, spun, and held out a hand in certainty that he would be there to take it. He was. “I like them,” she said. “But I like your own playing more.”

“I will play for you tonight,” he said. “Tonight and all the nights to come.” He lifted her hand briefly to his lips before they spun again, and bent, and turned to other partners.

“I saw that!” she heard Agnes Herries say behind her, and Christian laughed.

By the time they arrived at the manor house at Lymond the night air was cool on her skin. “Don’t light the lamp,” she told him, and she led him into the silent building, empty for their coming. She had overseen its rebuilding and as the house came back to life he had insisted that she learn every inch of it, to allow her to move as confidently in her new home as in her old. Now she took him through the hall, up the stairs and down the corridor, all the way to the door of their chamber.

“If life were to imitate song,” Francis said, “you would be the one to lift me over the threshold. But let me do this for you.” He grasped her firmly by the waist and lifted her; without the floor’s grounding she felt lost of a moment, but then he placed her back onto her feet, his hands still resting on her. She raised her hands to his face to learn his features all over again, but he turned his head to kiss her fingers, one by one, and then to kiss her face, as if he meant to use his lips to know her, not his hands.

“Christian,” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“It is extremely dark in here.” She felt him smile against her cheek. “How do you expect me to remove that dress without a light?”

She ran her hands to the neck of his doublet and began to undo the knots in the laces there. “I have great faith in your abilities,” she said seriously. 

He had found the laces of her gown and began to loosen them; she shivered at the feeling even through the embroidered fabric and her shift beneath. “Christian?” he asked.

“Yes?” Her mouth felt dry, and as if he knew, he lifted her chin and kissed her.

“I’ve forgotten where I was,” he said when they parted.

She took his hands and placed them back at the seams of her gown. “Here.”

His doublet was loose now, and she ran her hands down to the ties to his hose, and then paused. “ _For in this sacrament it is not the meryte of nature, to conceyue chyldren, but the blessynge of almyghtye God, and a mistery far passynge the merytes of nature,_ ” he whispered, resting his forehead against hers and taking a deep, shaky breath. Her dress had fallen from her shoulders, and he bent to kiss the base of her neck. “Something is caught,” he said. “The sleeves.”

“The sleeves,” she agreed, and held out her arms until all the fabric fell away, drawn down by its weight to the floor. His hands worked briefly and then her shift followed it and she stood, for a moment, in the cold air of the room. She shivered. “Francis?”

“ _Thou art all fair, my love_ ,” his voice came, “ _there is no spot in thee._ It was a beautiful dress, if no one told you, but not so fair as you.”

She heard the rustle of his own clothes falling to the ground. “I wanted to do that,” she said.

“On any other night,” he agreed. “Any other night, but not tonight, my dear.” He took her hands to guide her forward over the pile of clothing, but she stumbled and fell against him.

She gasped. Skin against skin: it was a whole world of new feeling, not just with fingers and palms but the whole of her flesh pressed up against him. He seemed to feel the same as he lifted her and brought them both to the bed, bending to kiss her all over, learning her body with hands and mouth as she did his, hands against the hardness of his chest, tracing the scars on his back, feeling the scars still on his hands against the soft skin of her stomach. He kissed her way down her body, until she found herself gasping and clutching his shoulders, and murmuring his name against his mouth when she pulled him back to her. He was whispering when he lifted his head from her, “ _Totz trassalh e bran et fremis, per s'Amor, durmen o velhan._ ”

Christian smiled. “ _Qu'en lieys es tota la merces, que’m pot sorzer o decazer._ ”

He raised his head. “Will you, my dear? Will you grant me mercy?”

“For after the evil will come the good,” she agreed, “and that will be soon, for such is my pleasure.”

end


End file.
